Never Fall for Your Fiancee

“Yet the fruit of his loins was just in our drawing room drinking tea! I knew about grandfather’s mistresses, of course—because Papa often told me about them—and not once did he give any indication he was cut from the same cloth. Which is the exact same cloth I am cut from. Two peas in a pod … I never wanted to put a wife or children through all that. I never want to be that man. I couldn’t bear it.”

“And that’s what all this is about?”

“I never understood why you were so hell-bent on me marrying for love when you married a man who had scant regard for it. Nor do I understand why you tolerate the evidence of his infidelities.”

“You think you are destined to follow in their footsteps?” She sunk back on the chair, shaking her head. “Oh, Hugh … What a pointless and wholly avoidable mess.” Tears swam in her eyes. Pitying tears instead of the sad ones he had expected at the reopening of such old wounds. “When I tried to talk to you about it all those years ago, I thought you understood.” She reached for him and gripped his hand across the polished mahogany. “But then, you were still very much a child and perhaps I am guilty of censoring those conversations, and too readily accepting your assertions you understood the situation and were at peace with it.

“Your father wasn’t a philanderer. In fact, he was the exact opposite. He fell in love with Charlotte when he was young and was still deeply in love with her when he took his last breath. She was always the only woman for him and apart from the first weeks of our marriage, he was always faithful to her.”

“Now it is me who doesn’t follow.”

“She was a farmer’s daughter. They grew up in the same village. Played together as children. As time went on, their friendship turned into love and they wanted to marry. But Hugh’s father wouldn’t hear of it. Future earls didn’t marry beneath them, and you already know what a horrid tyrant your grandfather was. To cut a very long story short, he went behind Hugh’s back to her father, threatened to turn them off their land and completely ruin them unless Charlotte terminated the engagement and promised never to see your father again. He had also brokered an arranged marriage with me. My father was a duke, so I was considered the more suitable and advantageous match. That was the way of things in those days … I was young, barely seventeen and much too cosseted to go against the plan, and I married a stranger not much older than me. Newly heartbroken, barely twenty, and always one to do his duty, Hugh did as he was told—but only because he had failed in his attempts to win Charlotte back.”

“She turned him down.” Suddenly it all made sense.

“She couldn’t see her family thrown out on the streets, and your grandfather was a cruel and vindictive man exactly as you have always been told. She didn’t tell Hugh all that, merely saying she did not love him enough, which must have destroyed them both. But on his final attempt to change her mind, the night before his wedding to me, as they said their final goodbye, Sarah was conceived. To be fair to your father, he never would have married me if he’d known, and they were much too young and green to truly understand the consequences of their actions.”

She looked suddenly wistful. “When your father said his vows to me, he meant them and he tried to be a good husband. He discovered Charlotte was with child the same week I discovered we were to have you and then the whole sorry tale came out. I ranted and I raved at the stranger I married and we were both miserable for the longest time—until I realized it wasn’t his fault. Any more than it was mine. It just was.”

“Because some things just are.”

Would he have understood all this at seventeen? Of course not. He was too busy being outraged on his own behalf and heartbroken at the perceived betrayal to consider the reasons behind it. The weight Hugh had always carried on his shoulders suddenly felt lighter.

“Hugh being Hugh, he couldn’t abandon them, and honestly, I never could have grown to love and respect him as much if he had.”

“You loved him?”

“As a friend, darling. We were stuck together for all eternity, there was no point in spending all that time miserable. But it was a marriage in name only. He kept his vows and quietly supported Charlotte and Sarah in case your grandfather got wind of it. We all muddled along as best we could for the sake of appearances for ten whole years, until your grandfather died. Then I gave Hugh permission to be with her, and in return, he introduced me to Jeremiah.… And we both finally got to enjoy being with the person we loved without having to pretend. Except, for Hugh, that wasn’t for very long.”

He felt a rush of emotion for his father almost as painful as when he had first died, except this was tinged with regret.

“Before he died, he made me promise to ensure you only married for love. I suppose I did take that promise a little too literally. Your father always did despair of my meddling. He would have left you to find your own love … which ironically you did, albeit with a little push from me. If it hadn’t been for my meddling, you never would have lied. And then you never would have met Minerva. Your father would have approved of your choice.”